Author Topic: The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]  (Read 2407 times)

Offline Drammor

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The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]
« on: November 04, 2012, 07:37:57 PM »
Important things: Depending on your build, Cha may be important. Otherwise, stuff like races, abilities, starting wealth and so on is the same as the Fighter.


The Fighter of Gratis              HD: D10
THERE WILL BE A TABLE HERE SOON
Class skills (4 + Int per level, x4 at 1st level): Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Craft (Int), Gather Information (Cha), Handle Animal (Cha), Intimidate (Cha), Jump (Str), Knowledge (Local) (Int), Ride (Dex), Sleight of Hand (Dex), and Swim (Str).

Class features
All of the following are class features of the fighter of Gratis.
Weapon and Armor Proficiency: You are proficient with all simple and martial weapons and with all armor (heavy, medium, and light) and shields (including tower shields).

Bonus Feats: At 1st level, a you get a bonus combat-oriented feat in addition to the feat that any other feats you gain at 1st level. You gain an additional bonus feat at 2nd level and every two fighter levels thereafter (4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 18th, and 20th). These bonus feats must be drawn from the feats noted as fighter bonus feats. You must still meet all prerequisites for a bonus feat, including ability score and base attack bonus minimums.

Fighter Talents: At 1st level, and every odd-numbered fighter of Gratis level thereafter, you gain a fighter talent, which must be drawn from the list below. You must meet all prerequisites for a fighter talent before you can take it. Unless otherwise noted, each fighter talent is an extraordinary ability and can be taken only once.

Puissance (Ex): At 5th level, you begin to focus your combat skills around a single, particular type of tactic. Choose a fighter bonus feat you do not have, that has one or more other fighter bonus feats which use it for a prerequisite. This feat is your puissance feat, which you gain as a bonus feat.

At the beginning of each day, you may select a fighter bonus feat that uses your puissance as a prerequisite, for which you meet all of the feat prerequisites. For the rest of the day, you gain that feat as a bonus feat, even if you don’t meet any of its other prerequisites.

At 10th level, you may select two feats that use your puissance feat a prerequisite to gain as bonus feats. You may use one of the feats you gain via your puissance as a prerequisite for another, but these feats cannot be used to qualify for feats you do not gain through your puissance. You may select three such feats at level 15, and four such feats at level 20.

If you already have all of the feats that use your puissance feat as a prerequisite, you instead gain a new puissance feat at any level for which you would not be able to choose another feat that uses your puissance feat as a prerequisite.

Tactical Adjustment (Ex): Beginning at 15th level, you may spend 5 minutes clearing your mind and performing refreshing exercises to modify your decisions on how to approach combat for that day. By doing so, you lose the additional bonus feats you gained from your puissance feature as though the day had ended, and may select new bonus feats, as though a new day had begun. You can use this ability once per day at 15th level, and twice per day at 20th level.

(click to show/hide)


Talents names with #s and parenthetical notes next to them need fixing. If those notes appear in red, it's because I've made an attempt to fix them, but no one has provided feedback on whether those talents are up to par, yet. Features and talents with names in blue are new to the class entirely.

I'm not quite done adding in features to the class, and I may also not be done removing them. Everything is ultimately up to the say-so of sirpercival. If he doesn't like it, it changes or goes away. Primarily, I will be adding in Specialist talents. A character can have only two Specialist talents, and in addition to modifying either the class skills or proficiencies of the class, they also add on effects that make certain builds more functional and enhance the effects of a few of the talents on the list.

Critique and suggestions requested.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2012, 05:19:52 PM by Drammor »
[20:32] <DonQuixote> A POX UPON YOU ALL!
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, J, FOR STEALING THE PURITY OF NORNS.
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, DRAMMOR, FOR ENSNARING ME IN THIS FIENDISH PRISON.

Offline Garryl

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Re: The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]
« Reply #1 on: November 05, 2012, 01:03:36 AM »
Armored Mage, Dragonscale Husk, and probably a couple others that I missed shouldn't remove your armor proficiency. Their uses restrict you from using heavier armor, anyways, and these are class features, not ACFs, so they shouldn't be removing things you already have. Plus, the original ACFs that cost proficiencies had those costs because they weren't replacing bonus feats, which almost all of the others did.

Does Arrow Swarm stack with Rapid Shot (that is, -7 penalty for +3 attacks)? Ditto for Rain of Blows and Storm of Blows.

I don't understand what Big Breath's holding your breath thing is supposed to do.

What is the action required for Calming Breath, Endure and Persist, and Steeling Breath?

Regarding Climb-Fighting, you aren't considered flat-footed while climbing. You are, however, denied Dex to AC.

Combo seems like a ridiculously wordy and complex way of getting a +1 bonus on attack rolls and, on 1 level out of every 5, an extra attack at -5 (or -10 or -15).

How does Clear the Path interact with transferring a +0 shield bonus to an ally?

The loss of BAB from Denigrating Banter is too much bookkeeping. You could easily lose tons of class features and feats, chaining into the loss of others, and so on. Just make it a penalty to attack rolls. Is the duration minimum 1 round, or minimum 2 rounds (1 round + minimum 1 Cha mod)?

Elusive Attack is a ridiculous AC bonus.

Encouraging Blow encourages you, so why does it depend on how smart your opponent is? The AC bonus seems a bit on the high side, but since it's only on a crit I guess it's okay.

How is Hard Charge not strictly inferior to Vicious Mount?

Spur should be called Improved Spur or something because there's already an option with the Ride skill to spur your mount, doing essentially the same thing (only it requires a skill check, deals a small amount of damage to the mount, takes no action, and has no daily limit).

Why does Steady Hand use such a low DC instead of the effect's actual DC? It also doesn't have a formula for non-spell mind-affecting effects. I'd suggest using the effect's actual DC.

Strange Strike is, well, strange in that it gives a scaling bonus (unlike the many +1/in place of Weapon Focus abilities), but is a competence bonus and thus may not stack with modifiers you have from other sources.

Strength Boost (and Constitution Boost) are unusual outliers. They give straight bonuses to your ability scores, thus kinda blowing away several other abilities.

For Vicious Mount, is it intended for your mount not to benefit should you be riding it in a non-seated position? Also, the wording on the critical multiplier for natural weapons bit could use some cleaning up, and it fails to account for natural weapons that already have a x3 or even x4 or higher critical multiplier.

Vital Aim should say "susceptible" or "subject" to critical hits, not "vulnerable", as vulnerable has uses elsewhere in the rules (usually denoting taking +50% damage). This ability interacts poorly with bows and crossbows as they don't add you Str mod to damage (and thus can't change it to Dex), but, oddly, quite well with thrown weapons.

There is still a heck of a lot of variance in the abilities. Quite a few are flat +2 damage bonuses under limited circumstances or replacement Weapon Focus feats for small groups of weapons.

Offline Drammor

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Re: The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2012, 02:41:25 PM »
Your concerns regarding armored mage, dragonscale husk, hit-and-run tactics, arrow swarm, rain of blows, storm of blows, calming breath, endure and persist, steeling breath, climb-fighting, clear the path, denigrating banter, elusive attack, encouraging blow, hard charge, spur, steady hand, vicious mount and vital aim have been addressed. However, I'm still not satisfied with elusive blow and might do something else with it.

I'm really not sure what to tell you about Combo. Yes, that is what it does, and yes that is a weird effect, but its function was disrupted by the way sirpercival's rules for iterative attacks work, such that taking Multistrike would render it nonfunctional. This was an attempt to fix the problem.

Yes, Strange Strike is strange. Are you suggesting that I remove the bonus type so it can stack with more things?

About the [Weapon] Focus talents, I've removed those for now. They'll be going back in after a suitable reworking is found.

Strength Boost and Constitution Boost are very good. I'm not really sure what to say about these, as they were taken straight from the book. Other than the fact that nearly everyone will take them, though, I don't really see the harm in having them there.

There is still a heck of a lot of variance in the abilities. Quite a few are flat +2 damage bonuses under limited circumstances or replacement Weapon Focus feats for small groups of weapons.

Yes, this is frustrating to me. The WF replacements are getting a closer look. They especially don't work well with Sir P's game on account of how he handles WF in the first place. The odd limited circumstance/+2 damage talents are also being looked at.
[20:32] <DonQuixote> A POX UPON YOU ALL!
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, J, FOR STEALING THE PURITY OF NORNS.
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, DRAMMOR, FOR ENSNARING ME IN THIS FIENDISH PRISON.

Offline Garryl

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Re: The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]
« Reply #3 on: November 05, 2012, 03:54:36 PM »
The Str and Con boosts were originally Kobold Fighter ACFs, Kobolds being supremely unsuited to being traditional Fighters due to their severe penalties to Str and Con. Think of those abilities as reducing your racial penalty rather than flat ability boosts, and they should be fine (assuming to restrict them to just reducing penalties and not stacking into actual bonuses).

Offline Drammor

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Re: The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]
« Reply #4 on: November 05, 2012, 04:08:32 PM »
I fixed each of them so that they require having a racial penalty to their respective abilities.

How do the talents look, now?

Edit: Oh look! I'm a senior member, now! :D
[20:32] <DonQuixote> A POX UPON YOU ALL!
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, J, FOR STEALING THE PURITY OF NORNS.
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, DRAMMOR, FOR ENSNARING ME IN THIS FIENDISH PRISON.

Offline Garryl

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Re: The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]
« Reply #5 on: November 05, 2012, 05:11:29 PM »
Dragonscale Husk needs to say that it's an armor bonus to your Armor Class (rather than being left untyped). The bit about multiple heavy armor-granting classes stacking for the bonus also doesn't make as much sense since it's based on Fighter level. Did you mean that levels in other classes that grant heavy armor proficiency stack with your Fighter level to determine the AC bonus? If so, please clarify it. Does this also apply to the non-AC benefits that the husk gives at higher Fighter levels?

Bad bolding at Hit and Run Tactics.

Offline Drammor

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Re: The Fighter of Gratis (High Arcana) [WIP]
« Reply #6 on: November 05, 2012, 05:42:22 PM »
Took care of them.

Any ideas what could fix the other talents?

And what about puissance and tactical adjustment? Do they look alright?
[20:32] <DonQuixote> A POX UPON YOU ALL!
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, J, FOR STEALING THE PURITY OF NORNS.
[20:32] <DonQuixote> YOU, DRAMMOR, FOR ENSNARING ME IN THIS FIENDISH PRISON.